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We are just over a week away from SIGCOMM 2015, with a packed program of exciting papers, workshops, tutorials, and really fun social events. We look forward to welcoming over 500 of you in London: http://conferences.sigcomm.org/sigcomm/2015/

This paper questioned the old rule-of-thumb for buffering at routers and contributed theory and experiments to show much less buffering is needed. It has ongoing relevance to issues such as bufferbloat and small buffers in commodity switching chips.

4. To increase collaboration between industry and academia in the field of networking, the Internet Research Task Force (IRTF) and the Internet Society (ISOC) in cooperation with ACM SIGCOMM are organizing a workshop on Research and Applications of Internet Measurements (RAIM), scheduled for the Saturday in between the 2015 ACM SIGCOMM Internet Measurement Conference (IMC) in Tokyo and the 94th Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) meeting in Yokohama. Details and submission instructions at https://irtf.org/raim-2015. Submission deadline: August 7.

5. The ACM-W Europe womENcourage Celebration of Women in Computing is a scientific event, and also an event aimed at networking and exploring career opportunities for women in computer science and related disciplines. This conference brings together researchers and professionals, as well as students in all levels of education, to present and share their achievements and experience in computing. Register by 08/08 before early bird ends! Should you have any questions, you may find answers on the event website or by emailing me (vgrande@acm.org). http://womencourage.acm.org/

SIGCOMM 2015 is fast approaching! This year will introduce several new programs including student mentoring, and industrial demos (running for the second year), besides the usual workshops and poster sessions. The early registration deadline is July 15, only a few days away. The details of the program can be found at: http://conferences.sigcomm.org/sigcomm/2015/ . Do plan to attend the community feedback session to share your concerns with other community members and to give your input to the EC!

In other news, the EU recently released a somewhat convoluted draft proposal supporting net neutrality for an Open Internet, yet simultaneously supporting fast lanes. Read more on the controversy at:

3. Workshop on Research and Applications of Internet Measurements (RAIM)

4. News from the EC

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1. We are delighted to announce that SIGCOMM 2015 awardee is Albert Greenberg (Microsoft Research) for pioneering the theory and practice of operating carrier and datacenter networks. Congratulations, Albert!

2. Congratulations to many members of our SIGCOMM community have who been elected as IEEE Fellows; to Kimberly Claffy and Vern Paxson for winning the IEEE Internet Award; and to Albert Greenberg who also won the IEEE Koji Kobayashi Computers and Communications Award.

3. To increase collaboration between industry and academia in the field of networking, the Internet Research Task Force (IRTF) and the Internet Society (ISOC) in cooperation with ACM SIGCOMM are organizing a workshop on Research and Applications of Internet Measurements (RAIM), scheduled for the Saturday in between the 2015 ACM SIGCOMM Internet Measurement Conference (IMC) in Tokyo and the 94th Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) meeting in Yokohama.

4. The annual SIGCOMM Rising Star Award recognizes a young researcher who has made outstanding research contributions to the field of communication networks. Each year, ACM SIGCOMM will present a "Rising Star" Award, recognizing a young researcher - an individual no older than 35 - who has made outstanding research contributions to the field of communication networks during this early part of his or her career. Depth, impact, and novelty of the researcher's contributions will be key criteria upon which the Rising Star award committee will evaluate the nominees. Also of particular interest are strong research contributions made independently from the nominee's PhD advisor. The award will be presented at the annual ACM CoNEXT conference, where the award-winner will deliver a keynote address. Conference registration, travel, and lodging for the awardee will be paid by ACM SIGCOMM. Nominations must be sent to Bruce Maggs by August 15, 2015, 11:59pm EDT. http://www.sigcomm.org/awards/sigcomm-rising-star-award

5. The 2nd ACM ICN conference will take place in San Francisco this year. We are soliciting posters and demos intended to showcase work-in-progress research. Topics of interest include ICN design, implementation and evaluation, as well as others listed here. We strongly encourage student and industry submissions. Both demos and posters should be accompanied by a 2 page extended abstract, which will be published in the conference proceedings. Further details can be found at: http://conferences.sigcomm.org/acm-icn/2015/cfd.php

6. The term of Victor Vianu, the current Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of the ACM (JACM), is coming to an end. A search committee has been formed to identify candidates for the next Editor-in-Chief and to recommend the most suitable one to the ACM Publications Board. The position is for a term of three years, renewable once, starting on September 1, 2015. The duties of ACM Editors-in-Chief are summarized in the ACM Volunteer Editors. Nominations should be sent by email to Joe Halpern (halpern@cs.cornell.edu). The committee accepts self-nominations. Nominations (whether of a colleague or oneself) should include a summary of the candidate's relevant research contributions and editorial qualifications. The committee will start evaluating candidates after July 1, 2015.

1. We are delighted to announce that Sylvia Ratnasamy, a faculty member at the University of California, Berkeley has won the ACM Grace Murray Hopper Award for her seminal work on distributed hash tables, a fundamental contribution to the design of large-scale distributed and decentralized computing systems. Congratulations, Sylvia!

2. In other good news, the SIGCOMM Doctoral Dissertation Award committee is pleased to announce that the 2015 winner is: Keith Winstein for his dissertation entitled “Transport Architectures for an Evolving Internet” This dissertation proposes and develops the idea of computer-generated congestion control, creatively solving both classical and new problems in network resource management.

The Honorable Mention goes to Hongqiang Liu for his dissertation “Traffic Planning under Network Dynamics” Liu's dissertation presents the design and implementation of practical, uniform, automatic, and proactive techniques to prevent the link congestion commonly caused by network faults and maintenance.

3. The annual SIGCOMM Rising Star Award recognizes a young researcher who has made outstanding research contributions to the field of communication networks. Each year, ACM SIGCOMM will present a "Rising Star" Award, recognizing a young researcher - an individual no older than 35 - who has made outstanding research contributions to the field of communication networks during this early part of his or her career. Depth, impact, and novelty of the researcher's contributions will be key criteria upon which the Rising Star award committee will evaluate the nominees. Also of particular interest are strong research contributions made independently from the nominee's PhD advisor. The award will be presented at the annual ACM CoNEXT conference, where the award-winner will deliver a keynote address. Conference registration, travel, and lodging for the awardee will be paid by ACM SIGCOMM. Nominations must be sent to Bruce Maggs by August 15, 2015, 11:59pm EDT. http://www.sigcomm.org/awards/sigcomm-rising-star-award

4. We are trying a new mentoring idea at SIGCOMM 2015: an opportunity for students and postdocs to meet individually with teams of two mentors to talk about the student’s research. The idea is to give graduate students (and postdocs) access to feedback from outstanding researchers from outside their university. Applications are due June 15th. More information can be found at the SIGCOMM 2015 conference website.

5. During the summer, we will be organising, again, a shadow TPC to train young researchers in how papers are reviewed and ranked at selective networking conferences. Selected researchers must have at least 3 years of experience in networking research and have published a few papers at workshops, conferences or in journals. During June, July and August, they will will evaluate a subset of the papers submitted to CoNext 2015. Most of the work (reviews, discussions) will be done online but the participants will also meet in an in-person TPC meeting on Friday August 21st in London (close to the SIGCOMM'15 conference location). Additional information about the operation of a shadow TPC may be found in a paper published in CCR in 2008 : http://goo.gl/EpSEnK

7. The Fourteenth ACM Workshop on Hot Topics in Networks (HotNets-2015) will bring together researchers in computer networks and systems to engage in a lively debate on the theory and practice of networking. HotNets will provide a venue for debating broad future research agendas in networking and for presenting innovative ideas that have the potential to significantly influence the community. The CFP is now online:

8. The Data Transparency Lab (DTL) is a community-based effort among universities, businesses and institutions to support research in tools, data, and methodologies for shedding light into the use of personal data by online services, and to empower users to be in control of their personal data online. In order to support research in these areas, DTL will award in 2015 up to 10 research grants of 50,000 Euro per grant to academic institutions worldwide. The criteria for applications and further information about the application

9. Building on the success of the HotSDN (Hot Topics in Software Defined Networking) workshop, the Symposium on SDN Research (SOSR) is the premiere venue for research publications on SDN. Co-locating SOSR with the Open Networking Summit (ONS) provides an opportunity for more interaction between researchers and practitioners and more influence on the networking industry. In addition, registered SOSR attendees can attend shared keynote, plenary, and panel sessions, and the social event, on June 17-18 at ONS. The SOSR program is now available at http://opennetsummit.org/conference/sosr/sosr-agenda/

Open Access is becoming increasingly important for the scientific community. The SIG is working with ACM to enable ‘gold’ OA on all SIGCOMM-sponsored conferences. More news on that front will follow in due course. In the meantime, good luck to those of you awaiting results from SIGCOMM 2015, and to those submitting to IMC 2015.

Here is the news for this month:

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1. SIGCOMM Rising Star Award Nominations

2. SIGCOMM 2015 call for posters, demos, and the ACM student research competition

3. SIGCOMM 2015 call for industrial demos

4. Call for Participation: ACM SIGCOMM Symposium on SDN Research.

5. CCR April 2015 issue now online

6. Nominations due for the ACM Sigmetrics Rising star award

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1. The annual SIGCOMM Rising Star Award recognizes a young researcher who has made outstanding research contributions to the field of communication networks. Each year, ACM SIGCOMM will present a "Rising Star" Award, recognizing a young researcher - an individual no older than 35 - who has made outstanding research contributions to the field of communication networks during this early part of his or her career. Depth, impact, and novelty of the researcher's contributions will be key criteria upon which the Rising Star award committee will evaluate the nominees. Also of particular interest are strong research contributions made independently from the nominee's PhD advisor. The award will be presented at the annual ACM CoNEXT conference, where the award-winner will deliver a keynote address. Conference registration, travel, and lodging for the awardee will be paid by ACM SIGCOMM. Nominations must be sent to Bruce Maggs by August 15, 2015, 11:59pm EDT. http://www.sigcomm.org/awards/sigcomm-rising-star-award

2. The SIGCOMM poster and demo sessions showcase works-in-progress in an informal setting. Topics of interest are the same as research topics in the SIGCOMM conference call for papers. We strongly encourage student and industry submissions. The SIGCOMM poster session will also serve as an ACM Student Research Competition. The CFP is online here:

3. The industrial demo session at SIGCOMM 2014 in Chicago had a great turnout and positive feedback, so it returns for SIGCOMM 2015. This session showcases demos from industry in the area of networking, networked systems, and networked applications, bringing industry and academia together around demos of innovative and cutting-edge networking products. Note the Submission Deadline of May 27. For details of the call see: http://conferences.sigcomm.org/sigcomm/2015/cfid.php

4. Building on the success of the HotSDN (Hot Topics in Software Defined Networking) workshop, the Symposium on SDN Research (SOSR) is the premiere venue for research publications on SDN. Co-locating SOSR with the Open Networking Summit (ONS) provides an opportunity for more interaction between researchers and practitioners and more influence on the networking industry. In addition, registered SOSR attendees can attend shared keynote, plenary, and panel sessions, and the social event, on June 17-18 at ONS. Details at http://opennetsummit.org/sosr/sosr-register/ (Early reg by May 9th)

6. The 2015 ACM SIGMETRICS Rising Star Research Award will be presented at the ACM SIGMETRICS 2015 conference http://www.sigmetrics.org/sigmetrics2015/, June 15-19, 2015, in Portland, OR, USA. The award is given annually to recognize a rising star in our community who demonstrates outstanding potential for research in the field of computer and communication performance. The selection will be based on the impact of the candidate's work in the field in creating promising new ideas, paradigms and tools related to the performance analysis of computer and communication systems. Please submit all nominations via email by Friday April 24, 2015. For details about the nomination process see: http://www.sigmetrics.org/awards.shtml#risingstar

Who owns your research? What should be the role of associations like the ACM? Are they publishers who market science? Or should they strive to make it available to all for free? ACM SIGPLAN is running a poll on these questions in which we encourage you to participate: http://goo.gl/vlCtn2
Here is the news for this month:

2. The industrial demo session at SIGCOMM 2014 in Chicago had a great turnout and positive feedback, so it returns for SIGCOMM 2015. This session showcases demos from industry in the area of networking, networked systems, and networked applications, bringing industry and academia together around demos of innovative and cutting-edge networking products.
Note the Submission Deadline of May 27. For details of the call see:http://conferences.sigcomm.org/sigcomm/2015/cfid.php

3. CoNext 2015 will be taking place on December 1-4, 2015 in Heidelberg, Germany.
Important Dates:
Paper Registration: June 4, 2015 (20:59 PDT)
Paper Submission: June 11, 2015 (20:59 PDT)
Notification of Acceptance: September 4, 2015http://conferences2.sigcomm.org/co-next/2015/

4. Building on the success of the HotSDN (Hot Topics in Software Defined Networking) workshop, the Symposium on SDN Research (SOSR) is the premiere venue for research publications on SDN. Co-locating SOSR with the Open Networking Summit (ONS) provides an opportunity for more interaction between researchers and practitioners and more influence on the networking industry. In addition, registered SOSR attendees can attend shared keynote, plenary, and panel sessions, and the social event, on June 17-18 at ONS. Details at http://opennetsummit.org/sosr/sosr-register/

For those of you who submitted a paper to SIGCOMM 2015, I hope you appreciated the Friday evening deadline, giving you the whole weekend to spend quality time preparing your IMC 2015 submissions. If you narrowly missed the deadline, fear not! The CoNext 2015 deadline is around the corner, in addition to a number of interesting workshops, industrial demos, and poster sessions to be held with SIGCOMM 2015, providing you with plenty of opportunities to enjoy the European summer or winter. For a summary of the workshops, see http://conferences.sigcomm.org/sigcomm/2015/ and for CoNext 2015 details see item 4 below.

Taking a broader view, it has been interesting to watch the net neutrality debate at the FCC (brief summary at http://www.cnet.com/news/fcc-and-net-neutrality-what-you-really-need-to-...). There seems to be an unexpectedly important role for comedians, TV presenters, and even adult video industry professionals in this debate, although many also believe that there’s no escape from first, business, and economy class data tariffs. I am certain that this year’s IMC will provide a forum for presenting new insight and thought-provoking results on this topic.

Here is the news for this month:

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1. Nominations due for the ACM SIGCOMM Award for Lifetime Achievement
2. MeetGreen to help with SIGCOMM-sponsored conferences
3. Cyber-security summer school to be held July 13-17 2015 in Estonia
4. ACM CoNext 2015 details
5. TMA Summer School

2. We are pleased to announce that that SIG has engaged MeetGreen <link goes here>, a meeting management company, to assist the general chairs and organization committees of our fully sponsored conferences. MeetGreen will reduce the strain on volunteers, ensure continuity across conferences, and contribute to sharing best practices within and across conferences.

3. A summer school on Information Security for PhD students and junior research is to be held in Estonia from 13-17 July 2015. A number of researchers from the SIGCOMM community will attempt to answer questions on how to keep data safe, how to safely share it, how to anonymise it, what it takes to reverse engineer data, etc.. The event is supported by the Estonian government, EU metrics project, and ACM SIGCOMM, and is being conducted by Olaf Maennel (Tallinn University of Technology, Estonia) and Jon Crowcroft (Cambridge University, UK). Details can be found at http://studyitin.ee/c3s

4. ACM Conext 2015 Conference will take place during December 1-4, 2015, in Heidelberg, Germany. Important dates and further info:

1. Congratulations to three SIGCOMM members who have been named ACM Fellows (Johannes Gehrke, Robert Morris, Henning Schulzrinne) and three who have been named Distinguished Members (Paul Barford, Ahmed A Helmy, Jason Liu)

3. Submit to the new SIG-sponsored Symposium on SDN Research (SOSR, formerly HotSDN), co-located with the Open Networking Summit June 17-18, 2015. Register your abstract by March 7, and submit by March 14. Both short (6-page) and long (12-page) papers will be accepted.http://www.opennetsummit.org/sosr15.php

5. As networking researchers, we love to work on ideas that improve the practice of networking. In the pioneering days of the Internet, the link between networking researchers and practitioners was strong; the community was small and everyone knew each other. Not only were there many important ideas from the research community that affected the practice of networking, we were all very aware of them. Today, the networking industry is enormous and the practice of networking spans many network equipment vendors, operators, chip manufacturers, the IETF, data centers, wireless and cellular, and so on. There continues to be a transfer of ideas, but there isn't a forum to learn about them. We are addressing this gap through a new series of articles in CCR. The goal of this series is to present articles that shine a spotlight on specific examples of technology transfer from academia to industry; focussing not only on the technology and ideas themselves, but also on the path the ideas took to affect practice. This path is not straightforward. Sometimes a research paper was picked up by chance; but more often, researchers worked hand-in-hand with the standards community, the open-source community, or industry to develop the idea further to make it suitable for adoption. We want their stories here.

We are seeking CCR articles describing interesting cases of "research affecting practice", including ideas transferred from research labs (academic or industrial) that became:
* Commercial products.
* Internet standards
* Algorithms and ideas embedded into new or existing products
* Widely used open-source software
* Ideas deployed first by startups, by existing companies or by distribution of free software
* Communities built around a toolbox, language, or dataset

We also welcome stories of negative experiences, or ideas that seemed promising but ended-up not taking off.

6. SIGCOMM 2015 will have a number of events, and tracks, including:
(i) the “experiences track”: http://conferences.sigcomm.org/sigcomm/2015/submission.php#experience
For this track, we are soliciting papers that describe design, analysis, and evaluation of techniques in commercial (or otherwise widespread) deployments. The deadlines are the same as for regular SIGCOMM papers
Paper registration: Jan 23rd
Paper Submission: Jan 30th

Having just returned from inside the ‘Halal Internet’ in Iran, I can fully confirm that the open Internet is both useful and fun! It was exciting to see a significant number of papers at IMC this year focusing on this topic, though care needs to be taken when performing such studies. Now that complications around Net-Neutrality may force the FCC to delay their rules for a while*, we can focus on the SIGCOMM debate on the ethics of measurement studies. There will also be a workshop held during SIGCOMM 2015 to provide a venue for continued open debate on this important topic.

Abstracts are due on January 23, 2015 and full papers by January 30, 2015 (both at 7:59 PM GMT).

2. Nominations are now open for the SIGCOMM doctoral dissertation award. To be eligible, the final dissertation defense should take place at the nominee’s host institution during the 12 months before the submission deadline. Submissions must be received by the current SIGCOMM Awards Chair, (Bruce Maggs) by November 30. Please see the nominations page for more information:

3. Starting Jan 2015, Aditya Akella (UW-Madison) will be hosting a quarterly student-mentoring column in ACM SIGCOMM CCR. The idea is to offer advice to students interested in networking on a broad set of topics that includes, but is not limited to, research methods, tools/testbeds/datasets, time management ahead of conference deadlines, career choices (industry vs. academia), choosing courses, and teaching networking. Students can send their queries on any of these issues to guru@sigcomm.org .

Aditya will collate related questions and provide guidance via this column, potentially by collecting opinions from different members of the community. The names of students asking questions will not be published by default, unless students request otherwise.

4. A summer school on Information Security for PhD students and junior research is to be held in Estonia from 13-17 July 2015. A number of researchers from the SIGCOMM community will attempt to answer questions on how to keep data safe, how to safely share it, how to anonymise it, what it takes to reverse engineer data, etc.. The event is supported by the Estonian government, EU metrics project, and ACM SIGCOMM, and is being conducted by Olaf Maennel (Tallinn University of Technology, Estonia) and Jon Crowcroft (Cambridge University, UK). Details can be found at http://studyitin.ee/c3s